CHASTENED executives of St. Martin's
Press this week halted publication of a controversial new
book by David Irving after the company was besieged
by angry telephone calls about the historical biography that
even the company's chairman concluded was "inescapably
anti-Semitic."

The company notified Irving Wednesday night about the
cancellation of his book, "Goebbels:
Mastermind of the Third Reich," with a faxed letter. The
British author vowed in turn to distribute the book around
the world on the Internet.

The decision by St. Martin's, a unit of the
British publisher Macmillan Ltd., came after weeks of
defending the book including vigorous statements from the
book's editor, Thomas Dunne, who insisted that when
he agreed to a contract with Irving in 1995 he was not aware
of the author's association with the Institute for
Historical Review, a group that questions the existence of
the gas chambers at Auschwitz
and the extermination of six million Jews in World War
II.

Yesterday, the company's chairman, Thomas
J. McCormack, said he had personally decided to cancel
the book's publication after a close reading of the 700-page
biography and a search of sites on the Internet, including a
"David Irving Page," created by Holocaust revisionists.
Company employees had also registered their disdain for the
book in an unusual two-hour employee forum on the issue
Tuesday.

"I hated it," McCormack said of the book. "I
tried to summon up why I hated it. It seemed to me that the
subtext was the ugly one: that Jews brought it on to
themselves."

Dunne said that he
agreed with the decision, but not because he was
disturbed by the book's contents. "I was the first one to
suggest that we haul down the flag on this one," he said,
adding that with mounting publicity about the book,
"There's been all this mud-splattering on innocent
people, horrible phone calls and death threats. Orders to
our college department were canceled." Dunne said he
himself had received several anonymous death
threats.

The book, a lengthy biography of Hitler's
confidant, is based on Irving's review of Goebbels's diaries
from 1923 to 1945, which he said he had read from microfiche
glass plates in a Moscow archive. His introduction begins
with the words "Writing this biography, I have lived in the
evil shadow of Dr. Joseph Goebbels for over seven
years."

Irving said this beginning indicated his views
on Goebbels, but his critics scorn his works, calling him an
apologist. In 1977, his book "Hitler's
War" argued that Hitler was unaware of any policy to
exterminate the Jews and theorized that the mass killings
had been carried out by others in the top command. In the
last five years, Irving has apeared as a guest lecturer for
the annual conference of the Institute for Historical
Review, which critics say is at the center of the
international Holocaust denial movement.

Yesterday, Irving said in a telephone
interview that he was "outraged" by St. Martin's decision,
which he characterized as slanderous and part of a larger
effort to persecute him for his views. "Because I write
history, which runs across the track of political
correctness, there has been for the last five years a
determined effort to silence me globally," he said.

Irving, who was paid $15,000 of his promised
$25,000 advance, said he intended to consider legal action.
But in the meantime, he said he had agreed to provide
computer diskette copies of his book to people who manage
Internet sites who have offered to post the material around
the world.